A Neo user posted a review of his experiences with this new Neo firmware speech chip. Here's what he said :

All right, fitting the new firmware chip is real easy, just pop the top of your Neo, prise out the old firmware chip and snap in the new one, takes just a few minuets. No real differences in the actual chip, same device type and memory size so I don’t know why they felt it necessary to ship it as a replacement chip rather than a flash update?

Powering up the Neo after fitting, reveals that the new firmware is rev 1.46, and the boot screen tells you that it is the speech version.

The Neo voice system is not really a voice, you have to install the supplied software on your PC, and after selecting a drive (your Neo), the software scans the directory structure and builds a small sound file for each folder and file on the drive. This file is saved in the same directory. So if you have 4000 tracks in 200 different folders you end up with 4200 small speech files on your neo disk, each file is about 11k in size. It’s these sound files that the Neo plays as you navigate folders and files.

I loaded the speech files into Cool Edit pro and played them with no problem, so I guess you could replace them with anything you want as long as the sound format and filename / extension are the same.

In use on the Neo it’s ok, although you do get some glitches if you navigate too fast. In terms of other features and bug fixes in the new 1.46 firmware it’s hard to tell, I listened to one of my play lists on the way to work with the random function turned on and it did play tracks which I’ve never heard the neo play before, weather this is just because the new firmware has a different random ‘seed’ or they really have improved the random function I wont know for a few more days.

The speech files are generated by some external DLL’s which the Neo guys have licensed from Fonix’s Ispeak, technology ( http://www.fonix.com/products/ispeak/ ) and do reasonable job although the female voice is too bassy for me, you adjust the speed and pitch of the voice but it really doesn’t make that much difference.

In conclusion, if you use the navigation controls on the Neo while driving then this is a useful update, however if you (like me) tend to select a play list or a folder before setting off, then Its usefulness is questionable however at 39 bucks with free shipping it’s a good offer.


So it actually generates and uses small speech files. Ugh. That's nice. Not. On my Empeg that would make about 8000 of those 11k sound files. Can anybody say : harddisk polution?